Read Online A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks - Free Book Online

struggle with books, each lesson requiring perhaps four or five, so that the boys walked invisible down the colonnades behind piles of textbooks and bursting briefcases lifted with both hands. It was good training for the runs, which culminated in a school race, six miles up and down hills, over the rifle ranges, through woods and, when their legs were buckling, across a broad lake and uphillto the finishing line. The white-haired head of history liked to show how easy the course was by running it without a vest before breakfast. He could be seen one morning jogging up the front drive with shards of ice clinging to the snowy hair of his chest, and blood running down his abdomen where he had forged through the lake’s ice.
    Pietro had no idea what it was all about. At first he tried to like the place. He imagined what kind of man had first thought of the quaint names for things. Where had it all gone wrong? He saw that the older boys were bent only on self-preservation. He copied them and said nothing unless he was spoken to; he gave up trying to puzzle out the philosophy of the school and kept his thoughts to himself. The good thing was that he never had time on his own. Only briefly at night on the hard iron bedstead, which he grew used to after a time, did he think about the changes in his life. But he was too tired to stay awake for long. The evening drill of supervised work, some more chores for the younger boys and the humping of the final dustbin-load of bread and margarine left him exhausted.
    The school, oddly enough, was expensive and enjoyed a high reputation. Parents in the Dorking district spoke well of it, without really enquiring what went on there. The boys never described it to them and, in any case, would have had little with which to compare it. An unplanned conspiracy of ignorance thus kept the school’s reputation intact, and allowed the Dorking parents to say things like, ‘It’s not as smart as one of the famous public schools, of course, but it’s jolly good in its way’; or, ‘They teach them to stand on their own two feet’.
    When they went for runs in the surrounding district, Pietro looked with pity at the houses there. He wondered why any normal person would want to live near such a place; he felt sorry for the children whose lives were darkened by their parents’ inexplicable decision to live in the shadow of the institution. Later in his life he drove through the leafy roadsof Colney Hatch and spent a day in the pleasant little town of Verdun. They were decent places in their way, but you wouldn’t want to live near somewhere so blighted by association.
    At the start of each term he would watch the boys arrive in old cars driven by their parents. They emerged from the Surrey woods, the sandy soil still on the wheels of their shooting-brakes. The women wore a cowed, defeated look, the fathers seemed embarrassed as they shook hands with their sons. The cars withdrew in procession through lines of rhododendrons and took slowly to the roads, through long forests of conifers and patches of land wired off by the Ministry of Defence. Then they dispersed, each to its minor road, which took it past numerous golf courses, through the occasional village with an unpatronised pub, then down the final sodden lanes with laurels and dripping evergreens back to an unheated house and the welcome of an ageing Labrador.
    Take me away from this, Pietro prayed, as he once more fell back silently into the prescribed routine. Take me back to London, take me to Italy, but take me away from Dorking. He was sure his mother wouldn’t have wanted him to be in such a place. The trouble was, she had never expressed an opinion. If only he had known how ill she was, he could have got her to tell his father what she wanted for him. When his father said, ‘Your mother’s going into hospital again,’ he thought it would be like the first time and she would be back in a few